a stately, dignified actress, best, no doubt, in tragedy.  Lastly, there was Mrs. Bracegirdle, the innocent publica cura, whom authors courted through their plays, and who had all the men in the house for longing lovers.  Who shall say how far ‘her youth and lively aspect’ influenced the criticisms that have come down to us?  She played Millamant to Congreve’s satisfaction.

V.

It is not difficult to understand how it was that Dryden thought The Old Bachelor the best first play he had seen, and the town applauded to the echo.  But it is a little hard to understand why later critics, with the three other comedies before them, have not more expressly marked the difference between the first and those.  There is no new tune in The Old Bachelor: it is an old tune more finely played, and for that very reason it met with immediate acceptance.  It is not likely that Dryden—a great poet and a great and generous critic, it may be, but an old man—would have bestowed such unhesitating approval on a play which ignored the conventions in which he had lived.  As it was, he saw those conventions reverently followed, yet served by a master wit.  The fact that Congreve allowed Dryden and others to ‘polish’ his play, by giving it an air of the stage and the town which it lacked, need not of course spoil it for us.  The stamp of Congreve is clearly marked on

the dialogue, though not on every page.  You may see its essentials in two passages taken absolutely at random.  ‘Come, come,’ says Bellmour in the very first scene, ‘leave business to idlers and wisdom to fools; they have need of ’em: wit be my faculty and pleasure my occupation, and let Father Time shake his glass.’  Or Fondlewife soliloquises: ‘Tell me, Isaac, why art thee jealous?  Why art thee distrustful of the wife of thy bosom?  Because she is young and vigorous, and I am old and impotent.  Then why didst thee marry, Isaac?  Because she was beautiful and tempting, and because I was obstinate and doating. . . .’  In the one passage is the gay and skilfully light paradox, in the other the clean, rhythmical, and balanced, yet dramatic and appropriate English that are elements of Congreve’s style.  It is in the conventions of its characterisation that The Old Bachelor belongs, not to true Congrevean comedy but, to that of the models from which he was to break away.  The characterisation of The Way of the World is light and true, that of The Old Bachelor is heavy and yet vague.  Vainlove indeed, the ‘mumper in love,’ who ‘lies canting at the gate,’ is individual and Congrevean.  But Heartwell, the blustering fool, Bellmour, the impersonal rake, Wittol and Bluffe, the farcical sticks, Fondlewife, the immemorial city husband, and the troop of undistinguished women—what can be said of them but that they are glaring stage properties, speaking better English than the comic stage had before attracted?  Germs, possibly, of better things to come, that is all, so far as characterisation goes.  The Fondlewife episode, in particular, which doubtless was mightily popular—what is there more in it than the mutton fisted wit and brutality of Wycherley, with some of Congreve’s English?  Such scenes as these, it may be hazarded, so contemptible in the light of Congreve’s better work, are ineffective now because they fall between two stools: between the comedy (or tragedy) of a crude physical fact, naked and

impossible, as in Rochester, and the comedy (or tragedy) of delicately-phrased intrigue.  The latter was yet to come when this play was produced, and meantime such episodes went very well, and their popularity is intelligible.  For the rest The Old Bachelor, though to us in these days its plot appear a somewhat uninspiring piece of fairyland, was a good acting play, fitted with great skill to its actual players.  The part of Fondlewife, created by Dogget, was on a revival played (to his own immense satisfaction) by Colley Cibber.  In Araminta Mrs. Bracegirdle began (in a faint outline as it were) the series of lively, sympathetic, intelligent heroines which Congreve wrote for her.  Lord Falkland’s Prologue is as funny as it is indecently suggestive, which is saying a great deal.  The one actually spoken gave an opportunity of the merriest archness to Mrs. Bracegirdle, and was calculated to put the audience in the best of good humours.

The faults of The Double-Dealer are obvious on a first reading, and were very justly condemned on a first acting.  The intrigue is wearisome: its involutions are ineffectively puzzling.  Maskwell’s villainy and Mellefont’s folly are both unconvincing.  The tragedy of Lady Touchwood, less tragic than that of Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World, is more obviously than that out of the picture.  The play is, in fact, not pure comedy of manners: it is that plus tragedy, an element less offensive than the sentimentality which spoils The School for Scandal, but yet a notable fault.  For while you can resolve the tragedy of Lady Wishfort into wicked and very grim comedy, you can do nothing with the tragedy of Lady Touchwood but try to ignore it.  In his epistle dedicatory to Charles Montague, Congreve admits that his play has faults, but does not take in hand those adduced above, with the exception of the objections to Maskwell and Mellefont.  ‘They have mistaken cunning in one character for folly in another’: an ineffectual answer, because the extremity

of cunning is equally destructive of dramatic balance.  He defends his use of soliloquy very warmly: of which it may be said that, so long as his rule—that no character may overhear the soliloquiser—is observed, it is a tolerable convention, but a confession of weakness in construction.  He declares he ‘would rather disoblige all the critics in the world than one of the fair sex,’ and, having made his bow, he turns upon the ladies and rends them.  An author campaigning against his critics is always a pleasant spectacle, but Congreve’s defence of The Double-Dealer is rather amusing than convincing.

It needed no defence; for with all its faults, such as they are, upon it, there are in it scenes and characters which only Congreve could have made.  Brisk is a worthy forerunner of Witwoud, Sir Paul Plyant a delicious old credulous fool; while the tyrannical and vain Lady Plyant is so drawn that you almost love her.  But the triumph is Lady Froth, ‘a great coquet, pretender to poetry, wit, and learning,’ and one would almost as lief have seen Mrs. Mountfort in the part as the Bracegirdle’s Millamant.  Her serious folly and foolish wisdom, her poem and malice and compliments and babbling vivacity—set off, it is fair to remember, by a pretty face—are atonement for a dozen Maskwells.  She is a female Witwoud, her author’s first success in a sort of character he draws to perfection.  The scene between Mellefont and Lady Plyant, where she insists on believing that the gallant, under cover of a marriage with her stepdaughter, purposes to lead her astray, and where she goes through a delightful farce of answering her scruples before the bewildered man—the scene that for some far-fetched reason led Macaulay’s mind to the incest in the Oedipus Rex—is perhaps the best comedy of situation in the piece.  But the scene of defamation between the Froths and Brisk is notable as (with the Cabal idea in The Way of the World) the inspiration of the Scandal Scenes in

Sheridan’s play.  When we remember that less than two years were gone since the production of The Old Bachelor, the improvement in